60 Minutes: Couric with Capt. Sully and the flight crew

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/lastwords.htm

 

I got the impression there was more to this story with the flight attendant than was told. Maybe there is some conflict with the company regarding her actions. Maybe she was initially blamed for wrongly opening the back door. Maybe she is the one who opened it, but is blaming a passenger. Maybe she's pissed that USAirways isn't providing proper compensation.

All I know is she said she hasn't put on the uniform since the crash. Emotional trauma? Could be. Could be something entirely different.

 

There are also a lot of pilots out there who have too much faith in their own abilities. How many would have tried to make the runway at LaGuardia?

 

His answer about being a hero, not wanting to diminish it but not embracing it as well, was stunning in its maturity and clarity.

 

Or perhaps there is still a lot of emotional distress there. If she suffered a bad injury, felt the worst of the landing by being in the back (where, they said, a huge hole was also ripped into the bottom of the plane), had water up to her neck and thought she was going to die, I can't blame her for still being a little freaked out by the whole thing. I agree that it seemed like something else was missing from her story. But if four of the five crew members are cool as a cucumber and one is still upset (it was a plane crash, after all), it doesn't diminish what they were able to do as a group that day.

As for Sully, what an extraordinary person. We were talking about the interview at work and if you made a movie of the landing, his calm, by-the-book demeanor would be a terribly boring script. Yet it's exactly what makes him and this story amazing.